A known technology for motor vehicles obtains environmental data indicative of environmental situations of a vehicle; the environmental data is output from one or more sensing devices including a camera and a laser radar. Then, the known technology identifies specified target objects located around the vehicle using the environmental data. Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2009-70344 is one typical example of disclosing such a technology.
For example, the known technology has pre-prepared dictionary data including feature quantities of target objects to be identified, and compares the environmental data with the dictionary data. Then, the known technology extracts data from the environmental data; the extracted data has a higher similarity to the feature quantities of a target object. This identifies the extracted data from the environmental data as the data of the target object.